Aceh military operation and the nationalist crisis

Aceh military operation and the nationalist crisis

Teuku Faizasyah, Ph.D.Candidate on Diplomatic History
and Conflict Resolution, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

A concerted effort to restore order to Aceh, including the
launch of a military operation to uproot the separatist group, is
in progress. Resorting to the military option has been regarded
as essential because, as it is often proclaimed, the unity and
survival of the Republic of Indonesia is at stake. Therefore, a
victory on the battlefield is a must.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer echoed this same
sentiment when he cautioned Australians of the possible negative
impact of regional instability if Indonesian forces failed to
fulfill their mission in Aceh.

The war in Aceh is portrayed as a contest between nationalism
and unity against disarray or disunity. Therefore, Indonesians
from all walks of life are expected to accept and support the war
campaign. Our journalists are repeatedly asked to behave
nationalistically and be "responsible journalists".

When emotions run high, speaking out against a popular held
belief risks that person of being labeled unpatriotic, or worse,
being suspected as pro-Free Aceh Movement (GAM). This whole
affair of a "perception setting" raises the question of whether
this rigid standpoint has any merit.

Is it fair to judge our nationalism from how we perceive the
war? What about our moral conscience: Can't we openly express our
sympathy of civilians' suffering and without being branded an
enemy of the state?

In fact, the level of our nationalism should be assessed from
our ability to empathize with the suffering of innocent civilians
in various parts of Aceh. Those civilians are no longer able to
live in peace or have peace of mind. It is somewhat ironic that
many of us can sleep peacefully at night while some of our fellow
countrymen are unable to close their eyes out of fear that they
may not see the sun rise the next morning or have enough food to
survive.

At the same time, the agony of war is felt not only by the
Acehnese in Aceh, but also by those who reside in other parts of
Indonesia, and even overseas. If those trapped in the conflict
zone experience physical or mental agony, the Acehnese living
outside the area are in mental anguish, especially if public
opinion is geared toward questioning their nationalism.

As if they are living in an Orwellian world, those Acehnese
have to behave and speak with caution because Big Brother is
watching them at all times.

In Indonesia's case, nationalism is often used as a rallying
point at times of crisis, such as during the war for independence
in the mid-1940s. In the late 1990s, when our currency collapsed,
the Soeharto government asked Indonesians to convert their
dollars to rupiah, supposedly as a show of nationalism.

We cannot claim that the Aceh conflict is an isolated case of
a weakening in the cohesion of today's Indonesia. Arguably, that
conflict is only the tip of the iceberg in our growing problem of
eroding nationalism. Nowadays, we are beset by a greater tendency
for divisive forces, provincialism and prioritizing the interests
of groups or political parties by putting them before national
interests.

Some resource-rich areas in Indonesia appear reluctant to
share their wealth with people of different ethnicities. Some
migrants who have cultivated land for a lengthy period of time
have even been expelled from their promised land.

Meanwhile, there are greater demands to reserve some strategic
positions only for natives (putra daerah). Also alarming is that
in some areas there are growing interests to reinvoke the old
sultanate system as a means of strengthening local identity.

It is somewhat ironic that when we are promoting a freer
movement of skilled and semiskilled workers in Southeast Asia and
globally, we are having difficulty managing some of the barriers
erected against our fellow countrymen at the domestic level.
Certainly, a quest for ethnic identity is a part of human nature,
but secluding other ethnic groups based on provincialism has
interrupted the fair game of equal opportunity in a pluralist
society such as Indonesia's.

Divisive forces and centrifugal dynamics are a challenge for
all of us. At issue here is how to deal with these developments
wisely. Perhaps we need to reinvent our nationalism and the first
step is by showing our sympathy and solidarity to those fellow
citizens suffering in conflict areas and those who have been
internally displaced after they were expelled from their promised
land.

In 1928, when our founding fathers made a youthful pledge to
keep Indonesia as one nation, what bound them together was their
sense of solidarity. However, back then it was the solidarity of
the oppressed. In the reform and democratic era -- supposedly
free from oppression -- we should be able to develop solidarity
from our conscience.

The second step is to avoid a narrow interpretation of
nationalism. The outcome of narrow interpretation is fanaticism
and the inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and
reality and illusion.

Therefore, we should not measure nationalism by physical
appearance. We need to ponder whether damaging an office of a
non-governmental organization (NGO) -- perceived as critical to
the military -- was a reflection of nationalism and a patriotic
act or simply blind fanaticism.

The third step is to dig deep and search for the root of the
cause of the various conflicts and national problems. For
instance, do problems in Aceh and Papua simply concern their
interests which, in theory, are negotiable, or do they concern
values that require a deeper analysis of the underlying factors
in order to resolve them.

Our success in reinventing our sense of nationalism and
ability to see the wisdom of our forefathers' pledge for having
one nation will hopefully make each of us a proud but sensible
nationalist. Indonesians unified by solidarity and consciousness
would free us from political scientist Karl Deutsch's rather
cynical definition of a nation: "a group of persons united by
common errors about their ancestry and common dislike of their
neighbors".